Vejas Liulevicius: observation

Transcript context

…Of course, you have to see the smartphone as an enemy, I would say, of that special time. You have to think because social media companies are maximized to get your engagement. They want to grab your attention, and they grab that attention by making you as braindead as possible and getting you to look at more and more and more things. So it’s nice and fun and it’s great. Recommend it highly. It’s good for dopamine rush, but see it as a counter force to the process of sitting with an idea for a prolonged period of time, taking a journey through an expert eloquently conveying that idea and growing by having a conversation with that idea and a book is really, really powerful. So I agree with you totally. What gives you hope about the future of humanity? We’ve talked about the dark past, what gives you hope for the light at the end of the tunnel? We talked indeed about a lot of latent, really damaging and negative energies that are part of human nature. But I find hope in another aspect of human nature, and that is the sheer variety of human reactions to situations. The very fact that history is full of so many stories of amazing endurance, amazing resilience, the will to build up even after the horrors have passed, this, to me, is an inexhaustible source of optimism. There are some people who condemn cultural appropriation and say that borrowing from one culture to another is to be condemned or the problem is a synonym for cultural appropriation is world history. Trade, transfer of ideas, influences. Valuing that which is unlike your own culture is also a form of appropriation, quite literally, and so that multitude of human reactions and the fact that our experiences so unlimited as history testifies, gives me great hope for the future. The willingness of humans to explore all of that with curiosity. Even when the empires fall and the dreams are broken, we rise again.…

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